Chanel Briefcase – Field evaluation

This project has been a great chance to learn skills in collaborating with other disciplines and working in a group. It was interesting to share ideas with each other and work with a new group of people. I really enjoyed being able to link my textile techniques with other subjects, for example collaborating with the product design students and coming up with the idea of a purse to go in the briefcase. I also discussed linking my designs with the interior design students ideas, creating patterns based on her themes for the rooms in the building. The experience was valuable to help me learn how to work well with a group of people and make compromises to create the best project result possible. We all got along really well and successfully linked all of our ideas together to create a cohesive final outcome.

I think my final samples all link together well, I have used a clear colour palette and similar techniques for each. The imagery I used was linked to the ideas for the interior which had different themes for each room. The themes were ‘classic Chanel’, ‘floral’ and ‘fierce’. I think I have portrayed these themes well with my variations of designs. I was mostly inspired by Chanel’s haute couture collections, I love the amount of detail that is put into them. I tried to reflect this with the embellishments of beads on my samples. I think the foiling is really effective and the gold creates the ‘luxury’ feel of the brand that I wanted. If I had more time I would have loved to make one of my samples into a finished purse, but my main focus was the textile techniques rather than construction. Something to improve for next time is trying to keep my samples as flat as possible when adding embellishments as some of them don’t lie very flat which loses the professional touch.